The library recognized a shift in how people were accessing information at the turn of the 21st century, said director Christine Dulac. It's a small service to keep students and the public informed and is not affiliated with the judicial system.
"It was just an access to justice issue," Dulac said.
Yet even as dozens of other states have moved their records online, Maine courts still largely remain in the world of paper files.
The state has spent more than $17 million to date trying to catch up, according to data provided Friday by Barbara Cardone, a spokesperson for the Maine Judicial Branch.
"It's years and millions of dollars in taxpayer funding later, with very little to show for it," said American Civil Liberties Union of Maine Chief Counsel Zachary Heiden. "How can we as a democracy function if the public doesn't know what's going on?"
Cardone said part of what's taking so long is that they are still developing a method for protecting "confidential data" included in otherwise public records. Cardone said the judicial branch currently doesn't have the staff to both run an eCourts system and ensure public access.
"We have limited human resources to address all of the issues that we have to deal with in rolling out the entire eCourts system," Cardone wrote in an email.
Court officials say they have been chronically underfunded for years and will need more money and staff to operate a secure and reliable system.
If the eCourts system isn't run properly, there will be consequences beyond the courthouse, Court Administrator Amy Quinlan warned lawmakers last month, apparently referring to a lawsuit initially filed against some North Carolina court officials involving their eCourts system.
For court employees, "the repercussions of if they don't do their job right has direct impact on people's liberty, in some instances," Quinlan said.
Millions Spent
Maine has been talking about an electronic filing system for years, but work on one didn't begin until 2016 when the judicial branch signed its 10-year contract with Tyler Technologies, a Texas-based software company with multiple offices in Maine that develops content management systems for the public sector.
Tyler declined an interview request, but a spokesperson said in an email these projects are complex and "the work we are doing with (Maine) will help provide a court system that streamlines processes for government workers and improves the experience for residents."
Tyler is being sued in North Carolina over its rollout of eCourt systems there. That lawsuit alleges several people were wrongfully arrested and detained because of issues with a Tyler system. The company has denied any wrongdoing in court records. State court officials were recently dismissed from the case.
Lawmakers agreed to let the judicial branch pay for the $15 million contract through bonding, a type of state loan.
Cardone said the state has spent roughly two-thirds of that bond so far ($9.8 million), mostly on implementation costs to both Tyler and other vendors for smaller updates. Maine has also paid Tyler roughly $7.7 million in annual operational fees.
Maine will still have to pay those yearly costs once the project is complete. Court officials are already worried about how they'll pay to keep it running.
Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill told lawmakers last month that the judicial branch won't be able to afford its eCourts program without additional funding. The courts are asking the Legislature to give them $1.8 million annually to pay for maintaining the system because they haven't been able to raise enough using surcharges and filing fees.
Meanwhile, other new initiatives have been put on hold. In 2019, lawmakers ordered the judicial branch to create a notification system for criminal defendants and others involved in court cases.
Heiden, from the ACLU, said a notification program would reduce the number of people who "fail to appear" on charges in court. But it won't take effect until they start moving criminal cases to the eCourts system, according to Cardone.
"It's not just a matter of convenience. It really has real world impacts, at a time when information is accessible and online and available," Heiden said.
Privacy Debate
Former Chief Justice Leigh Saufley surprised public access advocates in 2018 when she announced public records would be available online, for a fee.
But at some point in the last couple of years as the court system started to put some traffic and civil records online, it decided to halt public online access.
Attorneys and those directly involved in a case can still access their own files, but the general public can only see a "registry of actions." Cardone said files are still physically available at the courthouse for free.
Court officials said they made the policy decision out of a "commitment to protecting sensitive and personal information in court records from being released online and the inability of the current technology to provide that protection."
Some types of cases that are in the e-filing system would not be viewable to the general public anyway — like protection orders, which federal laws prohibit from being published on the internet.
New England First Amendment Coalition Executive Director Justin Silverman said the policy shift to remove that access amounts to courts reneging on Saufley's promise.
"If a document is public, then it should be public in the courthouse and online," Silverman said. "There shouldn't be a distinction between the two. I don't see much justification for denying that kind of access. ... It doesn't matter what categories of record we're talking about. If they are public, then they are public, regardless of where they're located."
Cardone, the court spokesperson, said she shares the concerns about limited public access, but the judicial branch's first priority is getting all cases loaded into a new case management system before the current one "fails altogether."
"Until we get all of our trial courts online, we are not going to be able to expand that access in the way that both provides the public with access to public documents and protects the private information of litigants that may be included in digital documents," she said.
Stanfill told lawmakers last month that the next step is piloting an online criminal case system in Androscoggin County this summer. The courts have given no indication what online public access will look like for those cases.
Silverman and the ACLU of Maine continue to press for more access, they say, as a matter of equity and accountability.
It's about "making sure that everyone in Maine can have access to their courts without having to potentially drive hours to a specific courthouse and take time out of their busy days to get information about cases they have an interest in," he said.
Data Implications
Stanfill told the Legislature she believes eCourts will be a worthy investment, one that will help improve the judicial branch's ability to collect and analyze data.
"Data helps us understand the cost and benefits of programs and strategies," Stanfill said. "Moreover, having better data available also fits with the goal of increasing transparency and openness in the judicial branch. The implementation of Maine eCourts will help us in marshaling that data in the future."
But the fact that the system is still a work in progress has often been used as a reason not to fulfill data requests and initiatives to improve the court systems.
Colby College professor of anthropology Winifred Tate was shocked a couple of years ago when she set out to pull court records on drug-related cases in Kennebec County for a research project.
Tate wanted to analyze who the state is prosecuting for drug use. She wanted to know the nature of their charges, how many people are pleading guilty and the circumstances of their case. Tate said she especially wanted to see if claims that Maine was diverting people from the criminal justice system held water.
The data was harder to pull then she imagined — she had to physically be in the courthouse and know the cases she wanted to pull. She spent several days sorting through manila folders stuffed with sticky notes.
"I didn't have the time — the months or even the years — to go through that," Tate said. "It was incredibly onerous, and I think really contributes to the opacity of what's actually happening in the courts."
Electronic records would undoubtedly make her research easier.
"I think it's really important, given the amount of money that Maine is dumping into the criminal legal system," Tate said. "What is a real, profound crisis in multiple dimensions ... we can't actually figure out what's going on if we don't have access or the ability to do this kind of research."
© 2025 the Portland Press Herald (Portland, Maine). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
